Sen. Jim "Snowball" Inhofe, (R-Kochland) wants to wreck Obama's efforts on the Paris 2015 climate agreement.
While right-wingers in Congress await the results of
litigation dedicated to squelching proposed rules that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity-generating plants, some leading Senate Republicans are
squaring off to undermine the Obama administration's international participation in the creation of an agreement on global warming in Paris by the end of this year.
One method for this undermining is to persuade leaders of other nations that President Obama may not be able to deliver any pledges he makes in the agreement because he doesn't speak for Congress. And they're looking at Republican Sen. Tom Cotton's notorious letter to Iran's leaders as a guide for action.
It's a scheme engineered by the usual suspects, of course:
Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.) said Mr. Obama’s unilateral pursuit of the climate accord exceeds the scope of president’s power. Mr. Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, plans to hold a hearing this summer focused on the Senate’s advice-and-consent process and its possible application in international climate negotiations. [...]
“The Tom Cotton letter was an educational effort,” Mr. Inhofe said in an interview. Other countries think “if the president of the United States says something, it’s just automatic …His letter was over there saying, ‘the president says he can do this; he can’t do this.’”
The battle of who has authority in this matter is not a simple matter of looking to the Constitution. As a University of Michigan
study by Glen S. Krutz and Jeffrey S. Peake noted in 2009, 52.9 percent of international agreements were executive agreements between 1839 until 1889. From 1939 to 1989, however, it was 94.3 percent. Decisions about whether or not Congress is given a significant voice on such a pact is an issue for political maneuvering rather than a shallow reading of the Constitution. These days, getting almost any actual treaty approved by the needed 67 senators is very tough.
Nearly six years ago, when negotiators in Copenhagen were trying to come up with a binding climate agreement, the Center of Biological Diversity published a report saying the president had the authority to sign such a deal, bypassing Congress altogether. That authority stemmed from laws already passed and court rulings already made, the center's researchers argued. These include the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency's go-ahead to limit CO2 emissions. Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones wrote at the time:
Michael B. Gerrard, a professor at the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University’s law school, recently wrote that the administration could enter a binding international climate pact via an executive agreement combined with the existing authority granted to him under domestic law. Michael Widmore, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law has echoed this view, noting that a section of the Clean Air act authorizes the president "to enter international agreements … and to develop standards and regulations which protect the stratosphere."
Perhaps the climate denier-delayer faction in Congress should follow Cotton's approach on Iran and send a letter to Mother Earth telling her not to get too excited about any global warming pact Obama agrees to without their okay. She'll surely pay attention.